Modern sex lives, eh? What a non-stop shagathon! Look at us, juggling friends with benefits, Tinder matches and side-pieces, barely pausing between orgies to catch a breath, or deal with our latest outbreak of crotch rot before heading, with vibrators locked and loaded, once more into the breach.
Not you? Sucks to be you! But if it's any consolation, as it turns out, you’re not alone. There may be a dating app or website for every conceivable kind of sexual relationship you might, in theory, want, but we are apparently having less sex these days than people did twenty years ago.
Last year University College London’s (UCL) National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles examined the sex lives of people aged between 16 and 44 years old and found that, on average, British women have sex 4.8 times a month, while men fare ever so slightly better at 4.9. Twenty years ago, this was 6.1 and 6.4 times a month respectively.
You might wonder if those figures are low because 16-year-olds are unlikely to have regular sex lives, and married folk with kids just don’t have the time. Yes, the age range may skew the numbers, but studies from further afield also suggest that sexual frequency is declining across much of the world.
In 2013, Martin Monto and Anna Carey from the University of Portland compared the sex lives of contemporary university students aged 21 to 25 to surveys of similarly aged groups during the late 1980s and early 1990s. They found that students have sex less frequently than those of the previous generation; and also that young people tended to overestimate the amount of casual sex their peers were having.
Monto and Carey’s findings are not exactly shocking. Plenty of young people aren’t having any sex at all. A 2011 American government study found that 15 to 24 year olds were having less sex than in the previous decade. Over a quarter — 28 percent — of respondents had never had vaginal, anal or oral sex, an increase of 6 percent of completely sexually inexperienced people in that age group since 2001. Between 2002 and 2010, 16.4 percent of American university students said that they had zero sexual partners in the previous year. Americans still seem to be faring somewhat better than their neighbours to the North, however. In 2012, nearly a third of Canadian students reported that they had had no sexual partners in the previous twelve months.
Even Australians are having less sex too. A 2014 study found that on average, heterosexual couples had sex 1.4 times a week, down from 1.8 when the study was conducted a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, young people reported having sex more frequently — but not by a lot. Aussies in their twenties have sex twice a week; those in their sixties have sex once a week.
Cath Mercer of UCL, lead author of the British study, believes that the stresses of modern life and the rise of technology both contribute to the relative sex drought. Instead of having sex, we’re worrying about money and jobs or checking our emails and being distracted by social media. I don’t doubt that Mercer is right, and I’m pretty sure Netflix deserves some of the blame too.
There was one interesting difference between the UK and USA findings — namely that American students had fewer partners than their counterparts two decades ago, while the reverse was true in Britain. The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles in the UK was first conducted between 1990 and 1991. The initial survey found that women had an average of 3.7 sexual partners and men 8.6. This has nearly doubled for women, with an average of 7.7 sexual partners in 2014, and increased by nearly a third for today’s British men, at an average of 11.7 sexual partners.
What’s going on? It seems counterintuitive, because you’d think that more sexual partners would mean more frequent sex, but the reverse seems to be true. But to be honest, I am not all that surprised – I have long suspected that contemporary dating conventions are, for want of a more romantic term, inefficient.
Dating sites work by selling us the illusion that there is an endless array of fish in the sea, but that’s not really the case. Sure, the numbers may be large, but sometimes those fish are not all that interested in the bait you’re dangling; and sometimes they are sharks or slimy bottom feeders. But the biggest problem isn’t the numbers, it’s the “catch and release” system. Flings have fallen out of fashion and one-night stands are the new norm. But this means less sex for most people — unless you’ve got great game or are happy to put in the time and energy into finding it. As it turns out, most of us are not.
Online dating is bloody exhausting — and frequently disappointing. That’s true whether you are a man or a woman. You’re more likely to get a date if you spend time actually reading people’s profiles and tailoring your messages to them, instead of cutting and pasting a standard opener. But crafting witty and interesting emails to multiple people ends up taking up a significant chunk of your spare time, often for little or no reward.
Tinder was supposed to free us from the tyranny of actually making an effort. It didn’t — instead it devolved into an online game of “Hot or Not”, with the actual number of messages and dates so poor a return on the number of ‘matches’ that Tinder recently had to tweak their algorithm limiting the number of times you can swipe right in a twelve hour period.
Of course, people do make matches and go on dates, but it generally requires more than a quick hello and checking if they are DTF. Nope, it’s hours of back and forth messaging and flirting before you ever meet — if you meet. If you’re lucky, you get along in real life; if you’re really lucky, they actually look like their profile picture; and if you are the luckiest of all, you get laid — but probably only once. Then you begin the whole process again with someone new. After a while it all begins to seem like way too much work, and frankly, you’d rather catch up on Archer.
There have been many scare stories written about so-called hook-up culture — that it makes people less willing to be truly intimate; that it's a threat to stable, committed relationships; and even that it promotes rape.
Most of these are, of course, bullshit. The handwringing and the moral panic is almost always directed at female, not male, sexual behaviour. Young women, we are told, tread the emotional and psychological minefield of a toxic hook-up culture, hopping from bed to bed, until they are finally too old and too battle-scarred to find a husband and fulfil their destinies as wives and mothers. This narrative ignores the fact that much casual sex is driven by young women, many of whom pursue sexual pleasure for its own sake, not as a substitute for romance and marriage. Good on them...
Hook-up culture is largely a myth and chances are, only a very few people are having lots and lots of casual sex with an incalculable numbers of partners. And if they are, so what? There are no moral or ethical dilemmas if two free agents decide to have consensual casual sex. There’s not even a health one — despite dire warnings of sexually transmitted diseases, a global study on sexual health which looked at data from 59 countries found no link between the number of sexual partners and sexual health. If there is a problem with hook-up culture, it’s a very prosaic one — it doesn’t work.
The issue is not that people are having too much casual sex — it’s that they’re not having much sex at all. Something will have to be done about it, so it will...